Another Saturday Night

The red light flickering in the corner of Ted's phone indicates a message has arrived on the phone. Bruce knows this even without asking. Ted drops by the apartment once or twice each week to visit and each time lays the blackberry device on the coffee table. It could have been for effect or Ted may honestly not feel comfortable with the phone in his pocket. Bruce doesn't read minds, so he wouldn't know. If were a mind reader, hemight make mroe money. Bruce works a teller job at Franklin Street Bank. He's had the job for three weeks and the routine is beginning to settle into his brain.

--Show up on time to be let in through the back door by the manager.
--Walk to your station and unlock the drawer.
--Pull the rack of the cash from the drawer and walk back to the vault with the manager.
--Silently count out the bills as the manager counts them into each tray for each teller working that day.
--Return the filled trays to the drawer and lock the drawer.
--If he is the primary teller for the day, pull the shades up and place all of the cardboard advertisements for checking and savings accounts. Make sure the standing cut out for CDs is facing the front door.
--Make sure all of the lights are on and all of the deposit and withdrawal slips are in the correct bins and that the pens have ink to write with.

Day in and day out for three weeks, Bruce has been working without break beyond Sundays off to secure enough cash to keep the apartment and amenities to which he has become accustomed. Before this job, Bruce had worked retail at a video game store in the local strip mall until the holiday rush died out. Before that, he worked in a cardboard cutting facility outside of the city for three months before the repetitive assembly line labor drove him to quit.

For the six years Bruce lived in the neighborhood a couple miles north of downtown, he had not kept a job for longer than six months. That single job was a contract position working on a programming project for a marketing company to track projects within for gaining efficiencies. After the contact was up, Bruce found himself struggling to find another opportunity in his field of study. Programming jobs within the city did not have any need for him as a new graduate. Each position required three to five years of experience with programming languages that had only been out for four years and which Bruce had not experience with in his time in school.

His girlfriend, Tara, pushed him to get a job in the short term to avoid living in his car. Obligingly, Bruce started at Radio Shack for a few months before quitting to take a course in a new technical field opening up. After a solid week of training, Bruce found himself further in debt for the training and no more experienced than before. His employment spiral continued downward and Bruce had not found another job to the one that brought him to the city. The closest he came was a two week effort designing a website for a local company that he is now confident has been replaced with someone else's efforts.

Bruce had slowly run out of options in the city until Ted put in a word with the local Franklin Street branch. Ted works in the corporate offices of Franklin Street's parent bank, American Streets Financial, as a finance executive. He routinely walks away from gatherings with friends to take important calls and constantly scans his email on his phone while talking with friends. Bruce hated this. He would complain to shared friends of the pretentious aspect of not giving full attention to the person speaking making the person feel like they are less important than an incoming sales report on a Saturday evening. In truth, Bruce was mostly jealous.

Ted was a family man and a supportive friend if one is to get beyond the second most important thing in the room to Ted. He lived for his job. Every update in every conversation included the bank. "How's it going, Ted?" "Great. We just moved into the top ten of banks in the tri-state area thanks to some number crunching I was involved in, so I'm hoping more good things are on their way." His family came up less often. The kids were always doing cute things the kids under four years old tend to do according to his wife, Trina, but Ted was less likely to notice. He was busy being the job and making the money to support his family. Bruce envied being the job.

After approximately ten flashes, Ted returned from the kitchen with a fresh beer in his hand. Crossing to the couch, Ted grabbed the blinking device and began flipping through emails before he sat down next to Bruce.

"So how are you liking the branch so far? Think it'll take? I know you've been through quite a few jobs, but give the bank a chance. At the teller position, you get solid hours and enjoy bank holidays as well as a solid paycheck and a bottom rung start into the Street's corporate ladder. A little initiative shown in taking more responsibility will get you up that ladder in no time." Bruce glanced up from the tiny screen only for the last few words and brought his eyes back to the screen before Bruce would answer.

"It's fine." His words came with reverberating clicking from Ted's phone as Ted responded to an email in the midst of the conversation. "I like the cardboard cut outs. I may bring the one of the woman ecstatic about 15% APR on the credit cards. Might even get rid of Tara and just introduce the cut out as my new love. We'll have a fantastic life at fine restaurants for half the price. I can order kids for us from the marketing catalog and I won't even need a 19 year old when I turn 50 because she won't age. I think it's a solid plan."

Ted continued clicking letters and staring intently at the screen a minute after Bruce stopped talking. He picked up his empty bottle and shook it in front of him to see if any beer would magically appear in the empty bottle. Not surprisingly, none appeared. The clicking stopped and Ted was watching Bruce shake his bottle.

"Would your new wife be jealous whenever you walked by one of those models in cardboard form hocking beer at the corner store?" Bruce smiled at Ted's ability to do multiple tasks and still not miss the conversation. Even if it was a bit off putting.

"Nah. We have an open relationship. I may have a weekly visit from the beer wench from the St Paulie Girl signs and she can see the deodorant cutouts every so often."

Ted tilted the beer back and watched the red light o his phone begin blinking again before he finished his drink. "Whomever you end up with, do you think they prefer you as a banker?"

"I told you the job was fine. It's not stressful and the people make it less repetitive throughout the day." He stood to walk to the kitchen for another beer. "It's really the downtime that gets to me. I was training for working on computer. I paid thousands of dollars over four years to be taught how to build applications on machines that don't require me to be at an office or anyplace beyond my couch in my underwear and there I am for roughly fours hours of each day sitting on a stool staring out into the open space and wondering why my new wife's ass is a flat chunk of cardboard."

Ted moved through the open doorway into his kitchen and pulled the handle on the 20 year old white monster of a refrigerator to grab another beer. Slamming the door shut, Ted grabs the bottle opener from the door and flicks the cap off in one smooth motion. Maybe I should have been a bartender. At least then I could drink when I get bored. By the time he returned to the living room, Ted was typing again on his phone. Chances were good this had happened at least once more before Bruce could return from the kitchen.

"Like I was saying, Bruce. Initiative. If you talk to the manager when things are slow and ask what you could do that might help you move up more quickly and fill the downtime, I'm sure you wouldn't be bored. At least, not from a lack of things to do. Give it time and stay focused and we could be sending our kids to the same schools and carpooling to the corporate tower. You do plan on sending your kids to schools, right?"

"I don't know yet. My cardboard love and I are still arguing over public schooling versus private schooling versus home schooling the fake kids. I'll talk to the manager on Monday if I find myself bored for a period of time again and see how that goes. I just know myself and I don't feel the value of the job yet. I still have that piece of my brain telling me I'll find a job coding something somewhere someday and that keeps my brain from accepting the need to pay attention to the details of the job."

"Even after five years away from it?" Ted had a way of stating things in painful perspective. "I may be working in finance just like I hoped when I went through business school, but I didn't always have this. I had to work through less than proper finance positions and some non-finance ones to get where I am. I'm just saying to give it a real chance. You might find it speaks to you after all. Might even find a career in it."

Ted smiled to hide the gritted teeth. He hated being told what to do in life even by a guy who had it all worked out. Maybe he resented authority too much to accept a new opportunity when it presented itself, but he had serious doubts this job would satisfy his need to do something he felt mattered in life. He did not look down on the job itself, he looked down on himself in that role of filling a spot to live his life from day to day.

Bruce's phone began buzzing on the table the minute he set it down. "It's probably Trina. We have dinner plans tonight. Mind if I head out and we catch up some more later in the week?"

Bruce sighed deeply at the chance to not talking about work anymore. "That's fine. Tell the wife I said hello. Go back to your perfect life and leave me to my squalor. Come to think of it, you're a pretty lousy friend. Why don't I live in your house with you? You wouldn't even know I was there in all of that space."

Ted chuckled as he pressed the send button on his phone. "I'll be sure to ask Trina and get right back to you on that." With a wave and another laugh, Ted walked out the door leaving Bruce to clean up the bottles on the table.

Bruce went back to his desktop keyboard and began typing up lines of code for some home projects. He had been working on teaching himself the new technologies he had no experience with in hopes of using that as experience on his resume. Tara would be home in an hour and hated when she found beer bottles on the table. She likes Ted, but felt the time he spent at their apartment was time away from Bruce finding the job he really wanted. She was ball of stress every time she came home to find out Bruce had quit another job. After so many years together, Bruce knew she wanted to get married but also knew it was unlikely while Bruce was job hopping and finances were so unstable.

His fingers stopped tapping the logic statements for a few minutes and he found himself unwilling to continue as he thought of how Ted's success always made him feel unfocused in his life. Pondering where he had gone wrong, Bruce moved back to the couch and knew he would still be there with a beer in his hand when Tara came home. So be it.